Michael Audain was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Jackson, Miss., in 1962, shortly before going on to co-found the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.Misc

Two buses were needed to carry 59 Sons of Freedom Doukhobors to Burnaby court from Oakhalla Prison. Charged with conspiracy, the men were remanded. Story ran April 4, 1962.
/ Vancouver Sun

Prominent property developer and patron of the visual arts Michael Audain has been an activist since he got arrested for trying to have dinner in the ‘coloured’ section of a Jackson, Miss., bus depot in the 1960s. He is one of the original members of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.Ian Lindsay
/ Vancouver Sun

Michael Audain says the zeitgeist of the ’60s was to blame: After being imprisoned in Jackson, Mississippi as a Freedom Rider, helping create the B.C. Civil Liberties Association seemed the natural thing to do.

For the others who sat around his living room in the days and weeks before they met on a December day in 1962 to found the organization, and those who followed, personal history differed but they burned with similar passions.

Those early years of the association were heady ones, Audain recalled — an infamous war was raging in Vietnam, the abuse of police power was rampant, there was no human rights act, no Charter of Rights and Freedoms and discrimination was de rigueur.

The West Vancouver home he bought in 1963 had a covenant on it that said he couldn’t sell to anyone who was “Oriental or of the African race.”

“I didn’t know how to tell my Japanese wife [Yoshiko Karasawa],” the silver-haired septuagenarian recalled with a chuckle. “Oh, those were the days.”

As the BCCLA celebrates its golden anniversary, Audain and those involved with its growth over the years are reflecting on the enormous role the association has played in the development of the rule of law and in defending the individual freedoms of all Canadians.

A few have gone on to wider fame, but most who contributed over the last half-century remain relatively unknown, even those in the pantheon of the province’s most renowned civil libertarians.

Still, the association has become the scourge of bully-boy police officers and governments that would ignore the Constitution.

When controversy swirled around pornography, polygamy or the heinous crimes of Robert Pickton, it was a leading voice in those important legal debates.

National reputation

Whether appearing in the Supreme Court of Canada arguing against anti-terrorism laws that infringe on free speech, or launching a legal challenge for the right to die, it has earned a national reputation.

“I wish I could be more active today,” said Audain, one of Metro Vancouver’s leading developers as chairman of Polygon Homes, but better known as one of the country’s most generous arts philanthropists.

“The organization is still vitally needed,” he said.

“There is a real continuing need for an organization that watches over the untrammelled growth of state power. There are new issues around privacy with body searches at the airport, Internet monitoring, near-constant public surveillance. The right to die is a very interesting discussion.”

It’s sometimes hard to believe the difference the group has made, Audain added.

He traced his participation to serendipity — in 1961 he fell ill, missed an exam and accepted an offer from his professor to write a makeup paper on the racial composition of a typical southern U.S. housing project. Audain chose a neighbourhood in Memphis, Tenn.

That brought him into contact with the Freedom Riders — activists on a campaign to monitor the implementation of desegregation orders in the South by riding interstate buses.

At 24, Audain was arrested trying to have dinner in the “coloured” section of the Jackson bus depot. He was sentenced to four months definite, four months indefinite and handed a $250-fine. “I spent a month in the city jail and the Mississippi State Pen,” he laughed.

Audain returned to Vancouver even more politicized and after that initial Saturday meeting 50 years ago at the University of B.C. International House, he became the BCCLA secretary for the first year.

That meant meetings continued in his living room. He remembers his peers being equally afire about everything from the war in Southeast Asia to literary censorship.

Unitarian minister Phillip Hewett was named the first president, but soon was replaced by Foulks, founder of the university’s department of pharmacology.

UBC philosophy professor Bob Rowan was instrumental (and his son now is a member).

In its first battle, the association supported the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors — 57 had been rounded up in a mass arrest in March of 1962 and accused of trying to intimidate Parliament. It was the terrorism scare of the day in B.C.

After about 18 months, Audain handed the record-keeping over to celebrated novelist and renowned lawyer William Deverell, who ran the association from the basement of his North Vancouver home. In those days, it spent a lot of time arguing on behalf of young people rousted by police misusing vagrancy laws or defending the Georgia Straight, then a cheeky counterculture weekly drawing the ire of the morality brigade.

By the end of the decade, though, Audain had drifted off to Woodstock and thesis work in Toronto, and the BCCLA was less a social club for the righteous and more a springboard for young lawyers out to change the world.

The association was among the few across Canada to rail against the imposition of the War Measures Act, which suspended civil liberties during the 1970 Front de libération du Québec crisis.

Reg Robson, one of the original founders, was president during the perceived insurrection and he condemned Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau for going too far. His tireless leadership was a catalyst that transformed the association into a serious force.

A firebrand sociology professor whose work focused on the effectiveness of alcohol treatment centres, Robson also provoked the long-existing and continuing schism between the BCCLA and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

He had a different vision of provincial autonomy than those in Central Canada and wasn’t about to kowtow to centrist sensibilities.

Writer, columnist, federal NDP leadership hopeful in 1995, Herschel Hardin was a board member in those days, too.

Fought for rights

Throughout the 1970s, the BCCLA was among the loudest voices calling for better recognition of individual rights. Initially an outlier, the association would find itself part of a bandwagon and in 1982 the country adopted a new Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The association was instrumental in having the courts strike down the provincial Heroin Treatment Act, which allowed the forcible detention and treatment of addicts. A landmark decision for the day.

It proved to be a strong advocate for first nations and minorities. It remains one of the few institutions urging Ottawa to square the effect of its involvement in foreign military ventures with Canadian values.

Immediate past-president Robert Holmes got involved after a law school research project and remains a fervent fan. He remembered that in the early 1980s, the association survived on the energy of a small dedicated staff augmented with enthusiastic volunteers.

It struggled along on small government grants and member contributions, but with a swelling reputation and greater funding came more visibility.

Capilano University philosopher John Dixon, a former student of Rowan’s, took over as president in 1984.

He had studied under Rowan’s guru, Joseph Tussman, at the University of California at Berkeley, who was a disciple of Alexander Meiklejohn, the late English-born, American civil liberties activist who believed education and free speech were the heart of democracy.

Dixon carried on Robson’s energetic approach and established the BCCLA as one of the most active and effective civil rights organizations in North America.

In 1985, he led the association into a huge battle over whether provincial electoral boundaries and representation were fair and constitutional.

“It was quite a thing to go up against now-Justice Bob Edwards [then still a top lawyer],” said Holmes. “[Former B.C. Chief Justice Allan] McEachern dealt with the first phase and [now Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice] Beverley McLachlin heard the full petition and decided it was unconstitutional.

“Quite the exciting kind of work for a young lawyer when you have a new Constitution and rights to be fleshed out and then you have the law move in a fashion that common sense would support, adhering to equality and civil rights.”

Though Victoria passed remedial legislation, those decisions remain relevant across the country for what they say about the relationship between the two branches of government and the role of the courts in reviewing electoral laws to ensure they comply with the charter.

Throughout the 1990s, the association was embroiled in the debate over the rights of AIDS patients and the serious issues over drug protocols; the Little Sisters bookstore sex censorship litigation; and it became more and more active in the growing discussion about provincial policing practices. “Not just oversight and achieving an independent complaint process but independent investigations so police weren’t investigating police,” Holmes emphasized.

“We pushed for an independent agency and we have achieved that, and that’s good all around: Police knowing that they have someone to answer to — the public.”

Dixon looked back at the association’s history with mixed emotions.

“Bigger, stronger, wiser, maybe a little more deliberate rather than impulsive in its activities,” he said of the association today.

“Those are all good things. We’ve come a long ways and we don’t seem diminished by the voyage. We fought the long, long fight trying to liberate the kind of literature and cartoons and graphics and music that gay people wanted to see, to liberate the sexual imagination. That was a great fight.”

But there also were disappointments.

“I guess for me personally,” Dixon reflected, “my struggle to get the government of Canada to reopen the Somalia commission, which was inquiring into a coverup of a torture-murder by the Defence Department, was the biggest defeat. That was an incredible disgrace — that we would shrink from a full and complete examination of why Canadian soldiers would torture a 16-year-old to death.”

Darker days

It still turns his stomach:

“It was buried by the national defence establishment, which tried to keep the minister in the dark for weeks while they tried to sweep it under the carpet. I think there were people too close to the government in power that would have been hurt by an inquiry. It was a disgrace we shrank from having it.”

He preferred to focus on the victories, such as the freeing of Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan farmer imprisoned for seven years for the mercy killing of his severely disabled daughter, Tracy. Latimer was refused parole in 2007 and the BCCLA took up his cause, with former president Jason Gratl filing an appeal.

Almost immediately, the decision was reversed and in February 2008, Latimer was granted parole.

“That was another great one to win,” Dixon said. “Brilliant lawyering by Jason Gratl. That was fabulous and would have been impossible without the support of so many other people.”

But that has nearly always been the case.

Even today, although the association is active on many fronts, there are only eight full-time staff, supplemented by interns, volunteers, law students and lawyers.

“It’s modestly funded, so goodwill and the pro bono spirit of the legal community have really been important,” Holmes said. “We appear in all levels of court on matters that give voice to people who otherwise wouldn’t get attention or a hearing. I’m perpetually amazed at the contribution of the legal community and the good work the association is able to take up and do.”

Gratl agreed.

“Because of that support, I’m very pleased in the last decade to see a ferocity from the organization appropriate to the incremental development of the understanding of rights and liberties in Canada,” he said. “With that maturing level of resolve and commitment and confidence in our ideals and principles and application to Canada as a whole, we can see the organization is flourishing.”

Gratl, though, like Audain and the others, worries about the constant temptation in government to trample on civil rights because it makes things easier.

The state is not necessarily evil nor should policing agencies be measured by the failures of a few.

The argument that by impinging “slightly” on privacy and individual rights, we can achieve collective security and more efficiency is seductive.

But it is a slippery slope.

“That’s something the BCCLA spends a lot of time on,” Dixon said proudly.

With one eye on the past, and another on the present, current executive director David Eby added: “Mission accomplished — we’re not closing down.”

In spite of the BCCLA’s successes, he said, there are still many concerns: The growing use of incarceration, which is expensive and ineffective; the increasing moves to remove privacy protection around medical records, to allow greater surveillance in public space and to give police more tools to track people through cellphones or monitor their use of the Internet.

“We have some victories we’re very proud of,” Eby said, “but there are a number of trends that are worrying on the horizon. I think we’re needed more than ever.”

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